


Three: The Constant Widower

by Darjeeling (Johnlockology)



Series: A Study In Grief [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, John Watson POV, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Romance, Slash, first person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johnlockology/pseuds/Darjeeling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson mourns Sherlock Holmes in some very personal ways, and tries to gather the pieces of his life back together with the help of some unexpected allies.</p><p>Note: This chapter will make more sense when read immediately following the first two installments of the A Study in Grief Series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three: The Constant Widower

 

_In which Sherlock becomes intimate with some of his favourite chemical compounds, and John stands by his grave, among other less devastating places_.

 

From the Blog of Dr. John H. Watson

Private Entry

17th January 20—.

 

We buried him today. An undisclosed location. Mycroft’s decision. Actually, they were all Mycroft’s decisions, right down to the granite headstone and titanium casket. Closed, of course. That bit was weird. I kept feeling compelled to demand it be pried open, so I could be sure, really sure. Mycroft said, in his usual dulcet but still oddly menacing tone, that it wouldn’t help. _“It doesn’t really look like him anymore, John. Seeing him might make you forget what he was actually like. For all intents and purposes, it’s nothing more than a waxwork dummy in there. Trust me.”_

Yeah, right, mate.

Still. What other choice have I got? Trusting Mycroft seems the least of my worries. And there’s something oddly comforting about someone who knows exactly what to do, no matter what kind of fuckery is afoot. I even let the bloody sartorialist choose my funeral garb for me. My widow’s weeds. Complete with blameless white pocket square like the petal of some preternatural flower.

_What’s that stuff called, Sherlock? The carpet of flowers blanketing the Elysian Fields?_

_Asphodel._

_Right._

Despite the secrecy, I knew where we were, of course. Hanwell Cemetery. Sherlock was buried where he lived, in Westminster. He was always keen on sticking close to home, when he wasn’t on a case. Having him nearby will be. Well, I don’t know if the word _comforting_ applies. But I’m glad, nonetheless.

Mrs. Hudson and I rode together in the back of an unmarked town car that all but screamed British Government. And other than me and Mycroft, the pallbearers were eerily anonymous blokes in black suits that did not come off the rack, for all that they were identical in cloth and cut. Draw your own conclusions. Sherlock certainly would have, with his signature smirk of amused contempt. And I would have lunged at him and bitten it off his face—swallowing his expression whole, so that it could be mine. So that I could take something of him with me.

If I could’ve carried him on my own, I would have.

I would’ve lowered him into the freshly turned grave like a child into a winter bed.

But there were several hundred kilos of unalloyed allotrope between me and his remains. All I could think of was how he was now intimately familiar with one of his favourite substances—formaldehyde. His blood replaced by a cocktail of ethanols and anti-edemic chemicals, all the redundant cells of his body softened, chemically conditioned to accept the involuntary absorption of arterial fluid that was the last act required of the body of Sherlock Holmes.

God. I know too bloody much about this. About all the things they’ve done to him to preserve the majesty that his death fatally compromised. The off-kilter perfection that can never be recreated or reclaimed. His hands clasped beatifically across his sutured chest. His perfect cheekbones and lush mouth caked over with industrial strength cosmetics. I kept thinking about how there’s no chemical to stop his eyes from clouding over. And how the worms won’t be able to strip him down to his beautiful bones, what with the bulletproof casing Big Brother chose. He’ll have to rot down there alone, lying in state inside his posh vacuum. Like the light of a star imprisoned in a black hole.

I don’t even know what he was buried in. The greatcoat, I hope. I can’t bear the thought of him cold. If he was here, he’d tell me how ridiculous I’m being. How sentimental and mawkish. _Death does that to people, you great twit. So does love. It’s the way most of us are. Maybe if I’d been the one to die you’d have been able to remain stoic and removed, but we’ll never know now, will we. I’m dying right now, and you aren’t here to study the effects. An inconclusive hypothesis for you, this experiment of human grief. You ducked out the back door before the lab results were in. Something much less tedious was afoot, I expect. Your death was anything but. And don’t fucking tell me that wasn’t a bit of a thrill for you. I know that it was. I know it._

_You didn’t fall._

_You threw out your arms and flew._

 

 

Fuck.

Why do I keep doing this? These blog posts aren’t helping anyone. And who, exactly, are they for? I never wrote a single word until I started writing about Sherlock. About our life in the warzone. He could be right, as usual. Maybe I’m just being maudlin.

Except. He never said that. It was me, imagining him saying it. Imagining myself through his eyes, wondering if I’m up to scratch. It’s mad. It’s utterly cracked. But I still care what Sherlock Holmes thinks of me even when he will never think of me again. You can’t go much further round the twist than that.

He’s dead.

Dead.

I keep saying that, as often as I can. As if the idea is contagious: if I’m exposed to it for long enough, eventually I will succumb.

I play it all out in my head, an endless loop. The fall. The brains, blood, and body bag. The way he lay for two days in the morgue. The elegance of his angle of repose, even with his sternum butterflied open and his organs glistening, beginning to turn. The supine anatomical position he could never maintain for long in life, not unless he was flopped languorously back on the Thinking Couch in 221B, his fingers steepled in his own private version of prayer. A prayer to his own staggering intellect. Or unless I was kneeling before him, worshipping him myself, so that he could take a break and just fall into my mouth for a few hours. His unflagging devotee.

I imagine it all, this transference of the body of my lover into a modern-day Ramses. And I imagine it done in the morgue at St. Barts, though I have no idea where they actually took him. Yet another Mycroftian undisclosed location. I can see the efficient hands, anonymous in their powdered latex gloves. Tasteful classical music playing as they massaged his limbs, chasing off the awkward stiffness of rigor mortis after having noted the effects of lividity. Knowing Sherlock, having lived with his bloody-mindedness, I’ve no doubt that his limbs were stubborn. Perhaps they even refused to conform to coronary coaxing, and a few of the larger bones were broken in order to force upon him the impression of ease, of a well-earned and grateful rest. I’ve no doubt they had to sew his lips shut to relieve them of the haughty expression that was so natural to him. And I’ll bet it didn’t work. I’ll bet he went in his box broken and non-compliant, teeth gnashing at the winding sheet.

I wonder who washed his hair clean and mended the broken places underneath the rich thickness my own fingers have navigated so many times.

Who coaxed him into his final ensemble, those long white limbs I’ve peeled free of lavender cotton. Those taut flanks my teeth have reduced to trembles. Who arrayed him for the funeral march, dressed not to kill but to have been killed.

_What could you possibly be wearing down there, beneath six feet of London loam, my Love?_

None of his clothes are missing, except the ones he was wearing the day he strode forth into empty air. No doubt Mycroft took care of that particular detail as neatly as he did everything else. I can’t decide whether that ability is one of his most endearing qualities or his most maddening. Both, I suspect.

Still, I hope the shirt they chose was lilac.

I hope he was tieless, with a paisley pocket square, carelessly folded. The colour of the marrow I daily longed to drink. My holy Sherlockian communion. That dark suit he wore as carelessly as he wore his dressing gown.

That’s how I’ll always imagine him. Wrapped in his vintage scarf and his couture overcoat. God knows where he got it. I never once saw him shop for, well—anything, really. I never witnessed him make an appointment for a haircut, or visit the dentist for so much a routine cleaning. He never jotted a note to himself— _buy fresh smalls_ , or _pick up socks and new toothbrush_. Despite no evidence of physical maintenance, Sherlock was always pristinely consistent, in every particular. Some kind of Asgardian defector with not a single telltale whiff of mortality clinging about him. Sherlock Holmes: no effort required.

Until now.

First times with Sherlock. Well. They’re never done by halves, are they?

_Don’t think about that now, John. In fact, delete it._

No.

Nope.

That I will never do. _Fuck_ that.

Okay. Okay. Now I’m just rambling. Time to shut the mental laptop, John, as well as the physical one. Crime Scene needs her supper, and her walk. Your clothes need changing. Flat needs tidying. There’re still some specimens in the veg drawer that need binning. Eyeballs in the ice-cube tray. An embryonic piglet or two floating about in jars.

Though I was thinking. They’d make rather impressive, if more than slightly macabre, bookends.

 _He_ would have loved the idea. I’m surprised he didn’t come up with it himself.

_John. You know what this means._

_Yes. You’re still bloody here. In my brain. In the heart of my frontal lobe, pulling strings. Nudging me along when I’m being daft--ineffectual as the wrong end of a straight razor._

Thank Christ.

I mean. Somebody’s got to do it, and I sure as hell don’t seem capable. It’s all fuzz up there. Static. A cracked-up crystal set. When I manage to tune it in at all, it’s Sherlock’s voice I hear. He sings to me in songs I recognize, so I know it’s him.

 _Hello, hello,_ he intones, a song he probably never knew sung in a baritone like a foghorn in the deepest shade of dark night comes in. _Anybody out there? Cause I don’t hear a sound. Alone, alone. I don’t really know where the world is, but I miss it now..._

                                               

 

Mycroft warned me not to look at the papers the day after the fall.

I listened.

But only til now.

Big Brother was mad to think I’d avert my eyes forever. I know I’m a soldier, good at taking orders and clicking my heels three times. But, see--I’ve gone rogue. Living with Sherlock will do that to a person. Among many other things. So, yeah. Against rather intently worded advice, I’ve saved them up, an ink-sticky stack, for today. I waited like a good boy for him to be in the ground before I fell apart completely. But I feel oddly calm. Comfortably numb, as another of the songs I’ve got on repeat keeps assuring me.

I open The Sun. The headline is a beauty: Sleuth Dead! Suicide of Fake Genius!

Don’t these idiots realize that even if it was true that Sherlock Holmes was a complete fraud--it doesn’t change the fact that he was a bonafide, dyed-in-the-wool genius? Only a person with genius-calibre ennui would make someone like Jim Moriarty up out of intellectual loneliness.

Only a completely cracked virtuoso _could_ make Moriarty up, for any reason whatsoever.

I don’t really read the articles. I just skim them. Mycroft would perhaps be only slightly less alarmed. The truth is that I only read the papers because I’m afraid to go to sleep.

I haven’t slept alone in more than a year.

And I sure as hell don’t want to sleep alone in Sherlock’s bedroom.

Lying there in the sleigh bed with the Periodic Table lulling me into the terror of my dreams would be the final surrender. An acceptance I’m not ready or willing to make. That the bedroom isn’t Sherlock’s anymore. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sleep in there. I’d just spend every single night for the rest of time waiting for his tread on the floorboards. The sigh of his shirt as he sheds it. The whisper of woolen trousers pooling about his pale ankles, and then. Oh, and then. The shiver of his pallid skin sliding up against the ruddy heat of mine. The kiss in the dark that is half bite. My inoculation against the bad things that come when the shutters of my eyes go down and the desert comes back to find me.

And it’s not like I can sleep in my old room instead. Because it’s not mine anymore, either. It’s just the place where I used to sleep before Sherlock Holmes opened his bedroom door and let me in. And then, for the first time in my life, I was home. It wasn’t just Afghanistan. My life was a desert long before then. After that last night in Kandahar, there was a vast nothingness yawning in front of me far more terrifying than the desert, because it was disguised as the city I’ve loved my whole life. But then. Well, then there was a light in a window, wasn’t there? And that window was this one. 221B. And there was a man with a violin and an intractable silhouette waiting for me.

The little sleep I manage to scrounge together on the Thinking Couch is a lot like like the change dug from beneath the cushions: it doesn’t buy much. I lie there with the tattered old tartan blanket that normally holds the stuffing of my armchair in. I cradle my head on my arm and stare at the dark. You’d be surprised how fascinating the dark is, when the last thing you want to do is close your eyes. When your secret fantasy is the simple joy of a fresh and baffling crime scene. When all you long for is to be told, lovingly, in an impatient baritone, what a complete and utter idiot you are. _It’s not your fault, John. It’s a simple and irrefutable fact. Like gravity. Or so everyone keeps insisting on telling me._

Clearly Sherlock Holmes had a bit of trouble with gravity.

And as for me, gravity is the least of my worries. I’ve got to find something to do with my life, now. I thought I’d found it. But I was wrong. I’ve never been more wrong, as it turns out. Not even when I thought being recruited for Armed Service wouldn’t be very bad. Something worth doing. My exact words. I’d no earthly idea what I was talking about then. Now I have even less of one.

So instead of trying to dredge up something I actually know about, I lie here with a record on. The Bose speakers Sherlock bought for my last birthday are perfectly clear, even though the sound’s turned down nearly to nothing. It’s like standing in the whispering-gallery at St. Paul’s. Voices clear as crystal vibrate in your eardrums, but you’ve got no idea where they’re coming from. The song I’ve got on repeat croons to me as if someone’s singing to me from very far away. A lullaby from outer space. Which, ironically, is where I used to think heaven was, when I believed in it. The singer’s voice is dry as sandpaper, and it’s barely a melody that he rasps out. _Baby, I’ve been here before. I know this room, I’ve walked this floor. I used to live alone before I knew you..._

Now I live alone again. I’ve returned already to my military austerity, and him not two days in the ground.

I keep a tight ship at Baker Street. I’ve tidied everything away. The unwashed beakers and microscope slides smeared with unspeakable specimens. The dressing gowns strewn over the backs of the furniture. The teacups mucky with pickled bits of animal anatomy. I didn’t want to do it. It hurt me to do it. Tidying it all away. Tidying _him_ away. But in the end, I couldn’t help it. Something else took over. Some _one_. Captain John appeared and pushed my useless, wringing hands away. He knew what to do. He always does.

But even he can’t make me sleep in my bed.

All he can do is fold up the blanket again after I’ve spent another interminable night on the couch where Sherlock used to to do so much thinking, so many sessions spent conducting the firing of orchestral synapses. It’s the one place in the whole of 221B where I _don’t_ think. Ironic. And peaceful. Like the desert when the shooting’s so loud you can’t hear it anymore. The incendiaries light up the sky like fairy-lights at Christmas and you’re a child again, for whole endless moments of time. When you’re a child, there is no Sherlock Holmes. Not that you know of, anyway. You forget that you hate fireworks as much as he loved them. Captain John retreats for an hour or two.

But he always comes back.

_You died, Sherlock. So I’m in the army again._

_I’ve even started wearing my old military tags. They dangle over my heart. They kiss my skin cool in the night when the sweat comes and you aren’t there to staunch it with your tongue. Oh, that clever mouth of yours, kissing satin now. Kissing silk that isn’t attached to the inside of my thigh. Men are so much softer than they tell us. They fold so easily into desire, and into earth._

I listen to music in the dark until Kandahar comes for me. I take a train to a station, and when I step out onto the platform, the war is waiting.

I’m so relieved I nearly weep.

 

 

My sister texts me fifty times a day, now.

She isn’t the only one.

 _Everybody_ keeps texting me. It’s driving me mad.

_Hey, John--fancy coming round to ours for dinner? Clara’s doing up a gorgeous curry. More than we can eat! Don’t call first, just come over. Please?_

**Delete.**

_Dr Watson--we’re in rather a state down here at the Yard, and could use some of your expertise. Call when you’ve a minute--it’s kind of urgent._

**Delete.**

_John, I. Sorry. Sorry. I can’t. I’m. Completely rubbish. I just. God. I’m so sorry._

I don’t delete that one. Molly is the one person to whom I can’t be unkind, even now. I save her messages carefully, like pressing the weeds children give as presents between the pages of a book I won’t read again until long after I’ve forgotten they’re there. When they tumble at last into my lap, they’ll be beautiful as roses. But not now. Not yet.

The only message I get that I want to hear is one from my old classmate, Mary. For some reason, Sherlock thought I’d only just met her when she rang a few days before he died. So odd that he mentioned her in his letter. Like she was someone who’d be more important to me with him out of the picture, when she’s just a paper cut-out sort of a person who once occupied the backdrop of my life at uni. But maybe Sherlock was right in spirit if not in fact. She’s head of pediatrics at London Bridge now, and it looks like there’s a job opening.

_Hello, John! Mary Morstan, again. I know it’s been quite a long while since we’ve talked, and I didn’t hear back from you the last time I rang, so I thought I’d try again. Mike Stamford was in for a chat recently. Said you’d been home for some time, but haven’t yet found your ideal work situation. We’ve got a position here at LB coming vacant--A &E surgeon. I did think of you straight away, only I thought you’d already settled in at a clinic. That’s what I’d heard, at any rate. But then Mike said it didn’t work out. You’ve been doing...something else, entirely. But now that’s finished up, apparently? Why don’t you give me a ring sometime soon, and we can talk about it. And if it sounds like something you might be interested in, I would be more than pleased to recommend you. I didn’t like to say it at the time--you know how it is, competitiveness runs deep--but I always thought you’d make the finest MD of all of us. I mean that. I’m so glad you’ve come back and you’re okay. Talk to you soon, Dr Watson. _

Right. London Bridge. Okay. I’ve always said I’d never work in a private facility, but now, I don’t really give a toss where I work, as long as I can get stuck in and forget my life for long stretches of time. There’s no point in wasting my skills. Which are, after all, considerable--no point mincing about with false modesty, either. I made a choice years ago to dedicate my life to saving other people’s. It seems more worth doing now than ever. People die, after all. People die every day. It’s what they do. Maybe I can do something about it, even if it’s only offering the sort of reprieve that only looks like a miracle to the untrained eye. I could do with a miracle or two, myself.

I ring Mary back straight away and arrange for her to recommend me for the post to LB’s Head of A&E. She’s friendly and dead nice. I can hear by the tone of her voice that she knows absolutely nothing about my present circumstances. Just an old uni mate helping out one of Her Majesty’s more functional veterans, nothing more. But enough, as Sherlock would say, to be going on with.

Not five minutes later, I get a text from Big Brother.

_I understand you’re interested in a position_

_at London Bridge. I would be glad to set up_

_an interview for you as soon as you feel ready._

_Or you could skip the interview entire, if you prefer._

_My services are at your disposal, John._

_MH._        

I sigh, feeling both irritated and oddly touched by his invasive solicitude. Almost like he’s transferred some fraction of the overbearing concern he felt for Sherlock onto me. Which is. Well. Rather kind, in a slightly unhinged sort of way. Anyone else would cut me loose without a backward glance. I’ve a feeling the elder Holmes sibling has no such intention. I don’t know whether to be chuffed, or. Well. Terrified, frankly. My life will never be my own. Losing Sherlock clearly isn’t going to change that. I guess we both must make do, Mycroft and me. Make do without Sherlock and with each other.

After a suitably independent hour and a half’s silence, I reply to Mycroft’s text with one of my own. 

_Right. Thank you. You’re very kind, Mycroft._

_Don’t let anyone tell you different. An old uni_

_mate of mine’s Head of Pediatrics at LB, and she’s_

_recommended me for the job, so I should get an_

_interview on my own. But thanks anyway. If I don’t_

_pass muster, I might give you a ring. I need this job._

_For reasons other than a dwindling bank account_

_balance. I feel like you’re the one person who might_

_understand that._

_JW._

_  
_He doesn't reply, but it's like I can hear him watching me. For some reason, it doesn't feel entirely Not Good. I must be cracking up.

 

After a meagre tea, Crime Scene and I step out into London. I want to show her the city that’s hers. That I’ll share with no one else, now. I’ve tied Sherlock’s old blue scarf round her, a makeshift doggie jumper like the ones I’ve seen posh dogs wearing in the High Streets. She’s so little. I don’t want her catching cold. Probably I’m just being ridiculous, but it pleases me to fuss over her. She looks pretty chuffed with herself, tripping along, admiring her reflection in every passing puddle. I had a dog when I was a lad, a terrier mutt with odd-coloured eyes who used to follow me everywhere, even to school sometimes, if my mum forgot to lock him up until he couldn’t see me anymore. He died, though. Hit by a lorry when I was in Year Four. I reckon maybe that’s why I wanted to be a doctor. I remember wanting to put his protruding guts the right-side in. Harry and I cried for days, even though she was older and supposed herself much tougher.

I won’t let Crime Scene get hit by any lorry. I’ll die, first.

She looks up at me like she knows what I’m thinking. I smile at her as if she knows what it means.

I catch sight of myself in shop windows as we go along. I look very small. A tiny, plain man with his collar buttoned up far enough to choke. My tired eyes lost in a hatchwork of lines and drooping skin. My normally neatly cut hair giving way to a weedy unkemptness the colour of dishwater. Is this the way I looked to him, I wonder? Because if it is, I can’t see him giving me a second glance after so brilliantly deducing me that day at St. Barts.

The only thing he didn’t deduce, at least not straight away, was the clamour of my pulse as my blood galloped through my ventricles. The way my mouth went dry at the sight of him. It was like seeing a man from the sky appear suddenly in front of me. And then wanting nothing more than to spend the rest of my life standing nearby. Nothing else. Just. Grateful proximity.

But then he looked at me. He looked at me as if drinking me in, every weary molecule--and in so doing refreshing each and every one. Sherlock’s gaze was like a baptism. I’d never felt so naked, so seen. So bathed in light. His light. The light that’s gone now. Gone forever. All I can do is close my eyes and remember it, but it’s a pale thing. It’s nothing more than the ghost of light, the afterimage of a dead star.

I wonder what Sherlock would think of all these beautiful and poetic thoughts I have about him now that he’s not here to distract me from my own mind. I seem like a straightforward bloke on the outside. A bit stodgy, even, though not without humour. Not at all the sort to conjure up love songs to dead friends. The truth is, I’ve always been a dreamy type. It’s how I’ve survived places like Kandahar. It’s how I’m still able to live in a world where people burn each other alive over liquefied dinosaur bones. I go into my own, private place inside. Not a palace, like Sherlock’s--but...a library, maybe. A vast hall filled with all the stories that’ve ever been, all the truths and lies we’ve dreamed up for ourselves since the first prehistoric man or woman ever picked up a burnt bit of kindling and traced a skittery proto-letter onto the floor of their winter cave.

Somewhere in my library, I know that letter is written.

Sherlock coaxed me out of the vestibule with promises of blood and danger. And something else. A promise of camaraderie that turned into something so much more. I didn’t need the made up stories so much when he was around. He was the best story I’d ever heard. And I was permitted to help write it. What on earth could possible trump that? Not a blessed thing.

Now, I live in stories again. I live inside music the way I did in the desert. I walk the streets of London, Crime Scene in tow, ignoring the burning teeth clamping down on my femur. It’s not real, after all. Nor is anything else, now. Not even London. It’s nothing but a beautiful mirage I’ve got to live in til it’s my time to go. My Mind Library seeps out into everything, until it’s all one pulsating hallucination: this city, the pain in my leg, the secret bastion inside of me.

The only real thing is his death.

It’s the only concession I make to reality.

Next to that, nothing seems very important. Which is why I need work. I understand the madness he used to battle, now--when there wasn’t a case to distract him. He’d do literally anything not to be bored. I’ve not got the same problem. It’s not boredom that hunts me down, the hours of my life slowed to a crawl. It’s the emptiness. The void of a life with nothing to fill it, a heart that aches for someone who’ll never breathe again. I’m not sure if boredom is worse. But it amounts to a similar need: something to fill it. Something sturdy to bar the portcullis doors. There be monsters outside.

If I don’t get that post at London Bridge, I’m not sure what I’ll do. The army won’t take me back, or I’d go straight to the nearest recruitment centre. I’ll have to satisfy myself with whatever war will take me. Even if it’s simply the war against exsanguination, myocardial infarction, and antenatal eclampsia. There are far less worthy battles.

Crime Scene and I find ourselves meandering through Hyde Park. We cross the bridge separating the Serpentine from the Long Water. The lake shimmers with stolen light. Fairy-lanterns and bobbing globes of streetlamps entwine the darkness, beckoning us on. Mist skurls along the banks like an unravelling skein of lambswool. It’s beautiful. By far my favourite park. Sherlock was often too impatient to just wander here, stopping to stand still and just breathe it all in. But sometimes, in a rare, mellow mood, he’d loiter for hours from Round Pond to Flower Walk, just holding my hand the way lovers do. Our spent kisses seem to linger here, tender ghosts among the bare branches.

There are no flowers now. Everything’s dead and naked against the sky. Waiting for spring to return blood to them. Sometimes dead is so much more beautiful than the showy fecundity of life. I’m learning that, now. I’ve had to. We’ve all got to take beauty wherever it shows up.

Crime Scene pulls impatiently at her leash, letting me know just how intolerably long I’ve stood here doing nothing but look at water and sky. We step over into Kensington Gardens. We turn right, away from Rotten Row towards the Statue of Physical Energy. Both horse and rider gleam in the low light, kissed by the risen moon. But I’m not here to see them. They have nothing to offer me now.

I stand, instead, in front of the statue of the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up.

_Second star to the right, and straight on til morning._

_Is that where you’ve gone, Sherlock--to put another intolerable James to rout? And then, knowing you, supplant him as Lord and Master of the Jolly Roger._

_Thing is, I just can’t imagine you_ Nowhere _._

 _There_ has _to be a_ Somewhere _for you._

_When it’s my time--can you just. Tell me where it is? Can you do that for me, love? Leave me a sign. I swear to God I’ll recognize it. One final Sherlockian Test to which I can look forward. It’ll make the hours and the days and the decades til it descends that much more tolerable. Or that much less. Either way, it’s what I want. Send me the directions. I can read a map like nobody’s business...._

I stare up at him for a marathon-length of time, but Peter Pan ignores me, though I’m his sole twilight supplicant. I’ve never been too fond of the likeness. There’s nothing magic in the bronze boy. He looks rather dull, and you can see that he only shams being to play his pipe. I knew a boy much cleverer by far, and he did grow up. He grew up and died. And it was an awfully sad adventure. Especially for the lone lost boy left behind.

I walk away, pulling Crime Scene from her enthusiastic serial-piddling against the statue’s fairy-encrusted plinth. We leave the infinite boy alone in the shadows and we make our way home to a shadowier place by far.

The bridge seems a much longer distance on the way back. An endless widower’s walk. I’ll never get to the end of it. Never in life and maybe not anytime after. And the thing is, I don’t really mind. I’m conditioned for long marches under impossible conditions. This is who I am. This is what I do. It’s what I’m made for. In the end, it’s what I’ve got, and I’ll cling to it with all my strength, which tonight feels boundless, if more than a little beleaguered.

Crime Scene presses her snout against my trouser leg, and woofs up at me. I pick up my pace. I even start to run, a little--just fast enough to numb the ache in my leg. Crime Scene barks merrily, joining in on my game. We run until we can’t breathe. And then we walk as fast as we can back to Baker Street, where Mrs. Hudson’s thoughtfully left a light on in the window. Whether it’s for me or for Sherlock, I don’t know and won’t ask. After all. It amounts to the same thing. I carry him inside of me now. Just like in the punchline to a poem he would have hated.

_Sentiment, John. Boring._

_Yes, Sherlock. Sentiment. Also known as love. The_ least _boring thing there is._

Sherlock is silent as I mount the steps and push open the lobby door to 221 Baker Street. In the foreground, growing in volume and texture as I ascend to Flat B, the music I left playing wafts out like a familiar perfume. _Hello, is anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me--is there anyone home?_ My hands tremble with eagerness as I unlock the door. I can’t help hoping. I try to battle it, but it’s always there. I even battle saying his name aloud, sometimes, as I come barging in.

The flat smells faintly of Darjeeling. And even more faintly of formaldehyde. I breathe it in, great greedy gulps, while it still lasts. Because it can’t. Not forever.

This time I surrender, and the syllables escape. “Sherlock?”

There’s nobody home. The moon lamp’s been switched on, and my own shadow’s the only one I see, detached from me and floating on the ceiling. I collapse into my chair by the embers of the fire Mrs. Hudson laid but forgot to stoke. It’s fine. I like it this way. Warmish, but not quite warm enough. Crime Scene curls up on the rug at my feet and I stroke her velvet fur with my toes. The music plays on and on, banishing the night. Banishing me to a place I can live in, for now.

I watch my shadow flicker in the undulating light like bunting leftover from a parade no one remembered to attend. Though my surgeon’s fingers twitch with professional longing, I can’t be bothered to sew it back on. It’ll keep. It’ll keep another night, another week. For the rest of my unremarkable life. 

**Author's Note:**

> This series is written by two authors working under the main pseud Johnlockology. Formaldehyde pens all sections contained in A Study In Grief written from Sherlock Holmes' POV, while Darjeeling supplies those written from the POV of John Watson, tag-team style!


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